<div><font face="arial, sans-serif">&quot;</font><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">This is all solvable, but it would be a significant expenditure of time and effort, and so far no-one&#39;s got round to doing it.&quot;</span><br>

</div><div><div><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><br></span></div><div><font face="arial, sans-serif">It only becomes a significant expenditure of effort because people are trying to reinvent the wheel and mix this issue up with unrelated and complicated issues of backup files, multiple instances, version control, and god knows what else. In fact, autosave is pretty simple:</font></div>

</div><div><font face="arial, sans-serif"><br></font></div><div><font face="arial, sans-serif">- periodically, you save the notebook to an autosave file, but only if it has been modified</font></div><div><font face="arial, sans-serif">- autosave only saves user input (which is all text fairly small), not the output or images</font></div>

<div><font face="arial, sans-serif">- the autosave file for &quot;filename.ipynb&quot; is &quot;#filename.ipynb#&quot; in the same directory</font></div><div><font face="arial, sans-serif">- the autosave file is removed whenever a manual save takes place (and only gets recreated once there are modifications)</font></div>

<div><font face="arial, sans-serif">- when you open a file, you check whether there is an autosave file for it and offer the user to recover it, open it as a new file, or delete it</font></div><div><font face="arial, sans-serif"><br>

</font></div><div><font face="arial, sans-serif">&quot;Periodically&quot; means something reasonable like every few hundred keystrokes or every few minutes or something cell related, whatever is easiest to implement.</font></div>

<div><font face="arial, sans-serif"><br></font></div><div><font face="arial, sans-serif">Autosave files are not backup files; autosave files only exist while there are unsaved modifications to a file and when something has crashed, so saving them in the same directory as the original file is fine and they don&#39;t clutter up anything. </font></div>

<div><br class=""><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif">Opening a file multiple times is also not an issue: you already risk data loss in iPython when you do that, and autosave files clobbering each other doesn&#39;t make that situation any worse than it already is. (Opening a file multiple times should be prohibited, but that&#39;s a completely separate issue).</span><br>

</div><div><font face="arial, sans-serif"><br></font></div><div><font face="arial, sans-serif">If doing autosave well over slow connections looks too complicated, just turn it off for slow/remote conections and put up a warning indicator in the menu bar; autosaving 95% of the time is a lot better than autosaving 0% of the time, which is the current situation.</font></div>

<div><font face="arial, sans-serif"><br></font></div><div><font face="arial, sans-serif">&quot;</font><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">Perhaps it&#39;s better to focus on reducing the need for autofocus. As others have said, Ctrl+S should work in all browsers to save the notebook. The original post also mentions problems with long output&quot;</span></div>

<div><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><br></span></div><div><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">You cannot fix this by trying to fix bugs elsewhere. No matter how many bugs you fix, computers crash, lose power, and get forced reboots from Windows updates. Nor is manual saving a solution because people don&#39;t expect to have to do that anymore and simply will not remember. I don&#39;t remember to (even now that it works), which is why I keep losing work in iPython. </span></div>

<div><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px"><br></span></div><div><span style="font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">Implementing autosave is a small task and easily done if you decide to do it, and it greatly alleviates the pain resulting from many other bugs.</span></div>